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Might as well continue my bitching into Tuesday. 😒 Had to get up really early for my appointment with Dr Walter… and everything was routine until he asked me if I would be willing to be seen by a new physicians’ assistant that they have added to the office. 😳😟 I think they actually added two other doctors as well… but like he and I were discussing, ever since the big changes that were made about six months ago they’ve been struggling to try and keep up with appointments, paperwork, insurance stuff, medicare stuff, workers comp stuff, etc.

So while I’m glad (for them) to see that they’ve added some auxiliary people that will help evenly distribute the workload, it’ll definitely take a while to get used to the new guy. 🙁 Dr Walter isn’t going anywhere, so if my condition changes he’ll be able to handle it, but that was his point… my condition has been relatively stable for a long time now, so my appointments are really just about prescription refills rather than treatment. 🤕 That’s why he felt like I was a good candidate to go to the new guy – freeing up Dr Walter (someone with a lot of seniority) to choose appointments with patients he still has a chance of repairing. 😏 And to be honest, it could be interesting to bounce ideas off of new guy – since on most days I still struggle to just reach “okay” … so fresh ears and eyes could help me in the long run.

After that, I didn’t really feel like going to the Social Security office to handle my insurance enrollment issues… so as soon as I got home I was on the phone again. 😐 I’m not sure why it took as long as it did, but just enrolling in the dental part of my Medicare Advantage plan took over a half hour. And for me, someone who gets super twitchy if I have to be on the phone for more than a few minutes, it may as well have been three or four hours. 😣

I ended up calling it a day around 3pm, even though there was still stuff that I could (should?) have made calls about. Couldn’t get through to the hospital again, despite definitely calling during business hours, and so far they haven’t returned my calls. 😠 That’s fine though… I’m fine just sitting here and waiting until another notice for those bills arrive, and another, and another. I mean, I’ll call again, but if they don’t seem interested in dealing with it, then I’m not gonna be terribly interested either. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Strangely, despite twitching out over the obscene amount of time that I spent on the phone today, I’m still feeling enough of a burst of energy that I’m gonna try to work on a few things around the house. I’ve got a couple of friends who have been hinting heavily that they’d like to come over, so I feel kind of obliged to make it look less like the house of a single guy and his white cat that’s in the process of being groomed. 😳🐱 But mostly I’m doing this stuff for myself, because the more organized and calm this place is, the more organized and calm it makes me. 😌

But after these crap days starting the week, I think tomorrow I’ll take at least half of the day off… maybe get my cameras organized and charged up, get the C64 Mini all updated, set-up, and hooked up. I dunno… Monday and Tuesday have me pretty grrr, so I really need to make tomorrow different.

I’m taking one more day, tomorrow, and then I plan on doing my best to return to society and engage with the humans again when necessary. 😐 I already know that I have a crapload of phone calls to make and take, but I’m actually talking about not looking like a hobo anymore, and actually leaving the house more than once a week. See, I haven’t shaved since the day before my surgery, so that means I’ve got 18 days of mostly gray beard that needs to get gone. 🧔🏻 I haven’t shaved through this point because I didn’t want to risk mowing over my stitches and ripping the incision open. 🚜😯

Being somewhat laid up, unable and/or unwilling to go out in public… it’s been grand. 😊 It’s selfish, yes, but “me doing me” for the better part of two weeks, even though I’ve been physically “bleh” for most of it, has done wonders for my mood. 😏 And discussing with friends, when I noted my unusually “okay” mood lately, they suggested that maybe my thyroid was actually causing some of the “mood disorders” – and now that it’s out and its function is being replaced by medication, it’s a possibility that it could be easier for me to maintain an okay mood because of it all. (There’s also a good chance the whole idea is psychological trickery, and I’m psyching myself into a decent mood under false pretenses. 😅)

I did get a ton of shit done yesterday. 🤨 Pretty sure I’m completely caught up on medical, mail, and bills… and it’s a good thing that I’m going through the medical stuff in such detail, because I’ve already caught a fraudulent bill for over $100 – for services that I know I shouldn’t have been charged for. (That’s one of the folks on the list of Tuesday calls…) The side effect is that my living room floor, where I do my work, is covered with various piles of paperwork, pens, envelopes, receipts, file folders, etc. 😯 I”ll take care of that tonight though, so tomorrow can be reserved for just laundry and a shave.

I’ll probably make sure the Insta360 is charged up tonight. Oh… yeah, I didn’t go out today – except for a quick trip to the truck stop down the highway for foodstuffs. 🌯🍩🍞🥤 But I’m gonna have that cam charged in case I wanna try anything, and then there’s also the Dover NASCAR race, the premiere episode of Series 11 of Doctor Who, and then I think the new season of The Walking Dead airs tomorrow evening as well. 😃🧟 Haven’t yet decided what I’m gonna do with my Monday though. When I made that “Three Day Weekend” post, I was only joking – because I was treating Friday as part of the weekend… and I didn’t even realize that there actually was a legitimate holiday this Monday. 🤔 Hmm, note to self, don’t put all these envelopes out in the mailbox until Monday night.

No updates for a while due to various circumstances. Thyroid biopsy was done a little over a week ago, which wasn’t as bad as I expected – but also more serious than I expected. 🤔👨🏻‍⚕️ Other than the doctor using a needle rather than actually cutting me open, it was actually a real deal procedure. Hooked up to monitors, in my gown, rolled from the waiting room to the procedure room… and then a couple nurses or technicians dealing with the ultrasound and instruments, while the doctor repeatedly jabbed me in the neck with a thicker-than-I’d-have-preferred needle. 😯💉 It took three different “pokes” to get enough cells for the tests that they needed to run, but the folks were all great, and always spoke in a very calming way that made it not nearly as anxiety inducing as it could have been.

Then on Monday I made it to my first of four dentist appointments. 😳 Rather than attack my whole mouf at once, they figured it would be easier on my face (and at least psychologically, on my wallet) if we split up the work on my teefs. So that appointment was a deep cleaning on the bottom, and then a gum line filling on one of the right rear molars. A little uncomfortable since they had to use a tool to push my gums down until the filling was complete, but I was good and numb so it didn’t really hurt until much later into the day.

Things have been hit and miss with my sciatic issue. Some days it’s almost unnoticeable, and then others there’s a continuous mild pain with some sharp bursts that also come with some weakness. 🤷🏻‍♂️ I’ve got a followup appointment with my chiropractor in the first week of next month, and I guess I’m still gonna go see him – just so I can update him in case I have my doctor doctor contact him for my info, when I ask her to look into this problem for me through whatever avenue she thinks might help.

And then my biopsy results… they came back a day sooner than I was expecting, and I actually got the call from the specialist on my way home from the dentist. 😒 They can’t really tell you anything definite from a small sample like that, so he says surgery is in my future. 😐 I actually had an appointment with him earlier yesterday, and I left feeling about as optimistic as possible when talking about this sort of thing. Like I had already been doing myself, he pointed out many reasons that I should feel far more optimistic than the average person when it comes to this – especially noting that sometimes people have thyroid defects that grow for years and years, and are never even discovered until they’ve grown to a size where it interferes with a person’s swallowing or breathing. 😧

There’s way too much to the situation to get into real detail, but I’ll just say that his “matter of fact” way (in a good way) of talking about the surgery, the treatment, the positive results that he expects and has gotten many times before in others… it helped provide a little ease to a decidedly uneasy thing to think about. So, it’ll come, we’ll hope for the best, and if that isn’t enough, we’ll just face whatever the next thing is after that. I think that things will be fine, even if not on the first try.

With all of the rain and warm weather, it’s getting to be about that time for mowing to start up again. I’ve already talked to my lawn d00d and got that all set up, but I still have to get out there and get things kinda cleaned up beforehand. I’ve got lots of plants that start growing before the first mowing even happens, plus the still-standing corpses of plants that grew and died last season… so I’m gonna do my best to get rid of all of that stuff, which will actually make the mowing that much easier for d00d’s mowing guys.

This work shouldn’t be too taxing, but I’m still planning on using the better part of a day to do it. Also today I’ve been gathering names and numbers for bush trimming services, so tomorrow I’ll be able to make some calls (hopefully) so I can get some estimates for the bushes around the house as well as the ones along the rear of the property. I hate spending money, but since I didn’t have anything done with them last year – I guess I can mentally take whatever it costs and divide it by two, telling myself that it was actually for service that covers two seasons of “bush stuff.”

Surprisingly, I got a decent night of sleep last night, so that’s gonna make today easier… half chill, half prepping for stuff that I need to do this coming week. I’ll be glad when all of the “outside stuff” has been handled though. It’s the same as the inside of the house… my brain just relaxes more easily when things are cleaned up and looking nice. And right now the outside of my property looks pretty rough.

It seems that, for a change, I did exactly what I needed to do to get myself feeling better from yesterday. 😳 Before I even started The Walking Dead last night I raised shields, cut off communications, and let things remain that way until half way through the day today. I only slept about 6 hours, but walking up to the sun rising, as well as to a phone that I had no intention of checking… it’s like the minimal stress of wondering what my phone will want from me is sometimes enough to tip me to the bad side, where whatever I’m trying to shake will remain. 😐 More of my weirdness, I suppose.

And it’s not like I’m in high demand or something… but it just helped everything about how I was feeling yesterday, to not be beholden to my phone or anyone wanting me for anything through it. (Make sentences bad, structure coming good tonight is not. 😅) And as they day progressed, even though I used the laptop to dick around on Twitter, I started feeling better. 🙂 As I was watching Justice League I started straightening the living room. As I watched some news I went ahead and ran the vacuum. And then before I started some YouTube videos about scanner/radio frequencies, 🤓 I took all the baskets of dirty clothes down to the basement and started a couple loads. All of that before I even thought about looking at my phone. 😀

When I did, I was relieved to see that I only had a couple messages waiting for me, and nothing on my social media of any importance. The world went on just fine without me. SHIT. I dothink I remember seeing a call notice though.

I guess I better check that now… 😅 ** pause while listening to voice mail **

Well I have absolutely no idea what the hell that was all about. Some fella left a message, and he knew my first name, saying that he was from Lowe’s installation and that he was calling about my “overnight cooktop” (I think) and wanted me to give him a call back to let him know if I’d be home. Heh… noidea. I guess I’ll find out tomorrow, but I can tell you right now the last thing I’m interested in is an overnight cooktop.

But anyway… all that’s left for me to do today is get these shirts onto hangers and up in the closet, and the towels onto the shelf into the bathroom and I’m golden. 😎 Just gonna take that for what it’s worth, and I’ll worry about tomorrow when tomorrow gets here. I’m just happy that I figured out what it took to get me through this day.

I’m trying to motivate myself to continue the work that I’ve been doing around the house. I moved my desk and desktop PC into the living room, effectively making the back bedroom “without purpose” and currently just serving as storage for that stuff that I want to sell or donate away. 🤔 If I do a couple more things in the living room it will be how I want it, with the stuff that I want in it, and I can move on to other rooms.

I just have a ridiculous amount of stuff for one person… much of it inherited when I moved into this house. 🙇🏻‍♂️ There are sentimental things, which will of course be kept / saved, but there’s plenty of “just stuff” stuff that can just go. 😏 I think I need to rid myself of the excess so that, if I decide to do so, I’ll be able to pack up and move out of here without it being as huge of a pain in the ass that it might be otherwise.

A few people have mentioned to me that the older you get, the less important “stuff” truly is to you. 🤷🏻‍♂️ And, feeling like I’ve aged a couple of decades in the past couple of years, I have to admit that I feel somewhat the same. I mean, I’m not interested in liquidating everything that I own… but yeah, there’s a point where “more stuff” is just more hassle, whether actively or just because it sits in the back of my mind, knowing it’s there and should be managed or dealt with or whatever. 🙄 So, for a lot of people, the idea of getting rid of as much excess as possible… it’s not that strange.

Believe it or not, if I had all of the rubbermaid tubs of family memorabilia tucked away in a storage unit, I could honestly get rid of most everything else in this house and still be happy. 🙂 Heh… it’s like the way my friend Jim lived for a long time. He had a two bedroom apartment, but one bedroom was only used to store stuff, he had no dining room table, no living room furniture, and was quite content with his bedroom set up awesomely enough that he never felt the need to spend much time in any of the other rooms. 😄 I thought it was weird at the time, but I can see how it would feel freeing now…

While I was cleaning this afternoon I came across my Windows 10 tablet, which I hadn’t used in many months. So I figured I’d plug it in, charge it up, and then download whatever updates it asked for. 🤓 It was a solid plan on paper, but within a few minutes of connecting the power I began to smell the familiar aroma of burning electronic components. 😳 I’m glad that what I was working on kept me in the same room, otherwise it’s hard to tell what might have happened.

I’m pleased with the amount of stuff that I got done today though. The living room is clean, the last little bit of laundry is clean and waiting for me to fold it, and then I sorted through some more stuff and added to the “sale/auction” boxes stacked in the extra bedroom. 😎 I did it all at a very “cautious” pace though… ‘cuz my brain is still being unpredictable, and I didn’t wanna push my luck too much. 😐

The accidental hour-long nap that I took this afternoon is gonna fuck me though. 😒 Not that I had a healthy/normal sleep schedule going on yet anyway, but yeah… I know I’ve got a few hours before I’m gonna even possibly feel sleepy. Guess that means I won’t have an excuse to not fold all these clothes before I sack out, eh?